The Downsides to SaaS E-commerce Platforms

SaaS e-commerce platformsare creating a buzz lately. And just like any new technology, many business owners are flocking to the platform to get a feel for it. But even with all its significant benefits, it comes with its fair share of downsides. Know these downsides upfront to ensure you make the right choice:

Challenges of handling complex processes on your e-commerce platforms

For an e-commerce website to handle complex business processes, it must be highly customized. This is especially true when you work with many carriers and have many warehouses to manage. It becomes even more complicated when you sell beyond borders, across many marketplaces, or run multiple e-commerce platforms. A minimalistic SaaS e-commerce websitecan’t undertake all those processes. You have to customize the SaaS e-commerce platform and integrate various functionalities to fortify it so that it’s able to run your systems and carry out your processes comfortably. This explains why most businesses choose to create their custom design e-commerce platforms.

SaaS e-commerce websites don’t offer opportunities for customization

SaaS e-commerce websites utilize templates, as well as inbuilt functionality. These features make SaaS user-friendly, which means anyone who has never run an e-commerce website before can use it. But the software comes with limitations. For example, you cannot customize your e-commerce website to your liking, as it happens in open source e-commerce platforms. That’s means that you can’t create a unique e-commerce website with SaaS.

SaaS e-commerce platforms cater for B2B sellers

Most e-commerce websites out there fall short when it comes to catering to B2B sellers. While B2C of e-commerce has a lot in common with B2B model, B2B needs are a bit different. Some of the B2B aspects that come with SaaS include quantity discounts, customer-specific pricing, and wholesale pricing.

Conclusion

If you compare the upsides and downsides to SaaS e-commerce platforms, you’ll be able to figure out if it is the right option for you. A SaaS e-commerce platform can suit you if you want to create an e-commerce website quickly and start selling, have limited resources to create an IT department, and if you need to integrate your e-commerce website with POS, ERP and 3PL system. SaaS can be an option for you if you want to create an e-commerce website on a budget, you cannot handle security, maintenance, and uptime and if you do not want to build an e-commerce platform from scratch.